Sir Walter Scott | Page 3

chivalry and
romance are not what Balzac is thinking about. Balzac is considering
Scott's imagination in general, his faculty in narrative and dialogue,
wherever his scene may be, from whatever period the facts of his story
may be drawn.
Scott's superiority to his American rival comes out, says Balzac, chiefly
in his secondary personages and in his talent for comedy. The
American makes careful mechanical provision for laughter: Balzac
takes this all to pieces, and leaves Scott unchallenged and
inexhaustible.
Scott's reputation has suffered a little through suspicion of his politics,
and, strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made responsible
for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally differ, but
of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who suspect and
blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and offensive to
modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such persons as
believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each successive
stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this party is Mark
Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in his Life on
the Mississippi makes Scott responsible for the vanities and
superstitions of the Southern States of America:--
'The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his

books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque "chivalry"
doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in
which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth
century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives.'
It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of it
may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it cannot
be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of this and
other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the feud between
the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to the themes
of the chansons de geste: of Raoul de Cambrai or Garin le Loherain.
Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed to the
ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in Ivanhoe or
The Talisman. I am told further--though this is perhaps
unimportant--that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the
taste of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of Gothic
towers and halls.
Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also the
most fervent and expressive admirer of the novels, quite beyond the
danger of modern progress, his judgment not corrupted at all by the
incense of the cotton-factory or the charm of the locomotive. Hazlitt's
praise of Scott is an immortal proof of Hazlitt's sincerity in criticism.
Scott's friends were not Hazlitt's, and Scott and Hazlitt differed both in
personal and public affairs as much as any men of their time. But
Hazlitt has too much sense not to be taken with the Scotch novels, and
too much honesty not to say so, and too much spirit not to put all his
strength into praising, when once he begins. Hazlitt's critical theory of
Scott's novels is curiously like his opinion about Scott's old friend, the
poet Crabbe: whose name I cannot leave without a salute to the
laborious and eloquent work of M. Huchon, his scholarly French
interpreter.
Hazlitt on Crabbe and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of
the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last
hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been
canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not

always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying
their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the
controversy there has emerged at least one plain probability--that there
is no such thing as simple transference of external reality into artistic
form. This is what Hazlitt seems to ignore very strangely in his
judgment of Crabbe and Scott, and this is, I think, an interesting point
in the history of criticism, especially when it is remembered that Hazlitt
was a critic of painting, and himself a painter. He speaks almost as if
realities passed direct into the verse of Crabbe; as if Scott's imagination
in the novels were merely recollection and transcription of experience.
Speaking of the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and Sir
Walter Scott, he says:
'It is the difference between originality and the want of it, between
writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest scenes and touches, the
great master-strokes in Shakespeare, are such as must have belonged to
the class of invention, where the secret lay between him and his own
heart, and the power exerted is in adding to the given materials and
working something out of them: in the author of Waverley, not all, but
the principal and characteristic beauties are such